Ok, I get it already, we lose orders because we don’t have feature X

I recently joined this company, and inherited a product that is world class. But it is missing a pretty important capability (to be fair, when the product was originally developed, this was a feature that wasn’t even a twinkling in the eye of the market).

I get that we lose orders because we lack it. We are developing a capability. It is not a 2 week (or 2 month, or even a 2 quarter) project. But there are still at least 1/2 the opportunties that do not demand the capability.

Is it too much to ask you to not waste time on lost causes? Is it too much to as you to sell what you have? Our product is vastly superior in performance to all our in class competitors. It isn’t even close. Focus on selling what you have. We will address the rest as soon as possible.

But one thing I can tell you is that continuing to chase lost causes, and sending lost order reports will not get the project done faster. In fact, it will cause me to tune out your grumbles.

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A coda:We make high end analytical instruments. We use computers as "controllers". We choose these computers to handle the operation of the instrument and analysis of the data.It infuriates me that sales often gets bogged down in trivialities around which CPU is used, what memory in installed, and how big the HD is. When one data file is about 10K bytes, there is no practical way you are going to fill up a 500GB drive. But to tell me that you MUST have 1TB or larger disk? Get friggin real.

A coda:We make high end analytical instruments. We use computers as "controllers". We choose these computers to handle the operation of the instrument and analysis of the data.It infuriates me that sales often gets bogged down in trivialities around which CPU is used, what memory in installed, and how big the HD is. When one data file is about 10K bytes, there is no practical way you are going to fill up a 500GB drive. But to tell me that you MUST have 1TB or larger disk? Get friggin real.